The existing literature on Bantu verbal semantics demonstrated that inherent semantic content of verbs pairs directly with the selection of tense, aspect and modality formatives in Bantu languages like Chasu, Lucazi, Lusamia, and Shiyeyi. Thus, the gist of this paper is the articulation of semantic classification of verbs in Kiswahili based on the selection of TAM types. This is because the sem...

In rural Tanzania, recent major influences happen between Kiswahili and English to ethnic languages rather than ethnic languages, which had been in contact for so long, influencing each other. In this work, I report the results of investigation of lexical changes in indigenous languages that aimed at examining how ethnic communities and their languages, namely Cushitic Iraqw, Nilotic Datooga, N...

This paper describes the implementation of Finite State methods, fsm2 in particular, in automatic analysis of Bantu nouns in one of the under resourced languages, Runyakitara. This is the first effort towards computational analysis of Runyakitara. A detailed description of Runyakitara noun classes and how they were analysed using fsm2 is given. In the current state of developing the system, 80%...

For decades the assumption in traditional phonology has been that URs had the two functions of (i) capturing generalizations (“what’s in the language”) and (ii) capturing the speaker’s knowledge (“what’s in the head”). Bantu languages have been among those providing evidence of robust morphophonemic alternations of the sort captured by URs in generative phonology. In this paper I take a new loo...

In this paper I examine how quantification is expressed in Logoori, a Luyia (Bantu) language spoken in western Kenya. I focus on the two universal quantifiers in Logoori, viz., vuri ‘every’ and -oosi ‘all’. I show that these two quantifiers display a number of syntactic and semantic differences and present a compositional analysis to account for those differences. Throughout, I discuss how the ...

The issue of Bantu vowel height harmony is one that most serious theories of phonology have addressed at one time or another. As is quite well-known, the majority of an estimated 500± Bantu languages exhibit some variant of a progressive harmony process by which vowels lower when preceded by an appropriate (lower) trigger. In this paper I have three goals. First, I present a comprehensive treat...

Kinship provides the fundamental structure of human society: descent determines the inheritance pattern between generations, whereas residence rules govern the location a couple moves to after they marry. In turn, descent and residence patterns determine other key relationships such as alliance, trade, and marriage partners. Hunter-gatherer kinship patterns are viewed as flexible, whereas agric...

There is disagreement about the routes taken by populations speaking Bantu languages as they expanded to cover much of sub-Saharan Africa. Here, we build phylogenetic trees of Bantu languages and map them onto geographical space in order to assess the likely pathway of expansion and test between dispersal scenarios. The results clearly support a scenario in which groups first moved south throug...

1. In groups of South African Bantu and Caucasian women aged 3 M years, sub-divided into those having had (i) none to two or (ii) seven or more children, measurements of radiographs of the second metacarpal and of the humerus were made in respect of length, cortical thickness, cortical index, cortical area/total area, cross-sectional area index and cortical/surface area ratio. 2. In Bantu mothe...